Elections

Hours before the presidential debate on Thursday, President Biden’s campaign launched a website targeting Project 2025, a policy and staffing playbook assembled by allies of former President Donald J. Trump that proposes an overhaul of the government under a new Republican administration.The Biden campaign’s website associates Project 2025 — a transition agenda compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and dozens of similarly aligned groups — with Mr. Trump, saying it would enable him to “gut democratic checks and balances, and consolidate power in the Oval Office.”Project 2025 is not Mr. Trump’s official platform; his campaign instead points to Agenda47, which focuses on substantially curtailing immigration and encouraging economic growth. But Project 2025 has nonetheless raised Democratic fears about what a second Trump term would look like.Conservative policy groups in 2016 were largely unprepared for Mr. Trump’s win. Since its announcement in 2022, these groups prepared Project 2025, a 920-page document outlining a radical transformation of the executive branch. The platform proposes replacing many federal civil servant jobs with political appointees who would be loyal to the president. The plan also proposes a cracking down on abortion rights, criminalizing pornography, cutting climate research funding and eliminating the Commerce Department.Detailed policy proposals rarely attract much attention, but Project 2025 has resonated in liberal social media circles. John Oliver released a “Last Week Tonight” segment on Project 2025 last week, which has more than five million views on YouTube. Charlamagne tha God, a podcaster, has told his fans that the platform would enshrine an “authoritarian state” in America. Excerpts from Project 2025 have also gone viral on TikTok.Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for the Biden-Harris campaign, said that Project 2025 underscored the stakes of the 2024 election.“The American people are tuning in to just how extreme and unpopular Donald Trump’s second-term playbook is — and they’re ready to stop him this November,” Ms. Chitika said in a statement.It remains to be seen if Mr. Biden will make Project 2025 a focus of his comments at the debate tonight. More

This month’s picks look at a summer in Paris, a summer at the Olympics and the heat of the erotic thriller.The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.‘Chronicle of a Summer’ (1961)Stream it on the Criterion Channel.What better way to celebrate the summer than with a summer-set documentary essential to the proliferation of the term “cinema-vérité,” one of the major concepts in nonfiction filmmaking? Except that cinema-vérité as presented in “Chronicle of a Summer,” the pioneering work from the anthropologist Jean Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin, means something different from what it has come to connote today. “Chronicle of a Summer” doesn’t belong to the “direct cinema” school associated with filmmakers like the Maysles Brothers (“Grey Gardens”), who sought, with varying degrees of success, not to involve themselves in the action while the camera was rolling, or with Frederick Wiseman’s filmmaking methods. (Although Wiseman never asks questions, he always resists labels like “cinema-vérité” or “observational cinema”; he prefers the term “movies.”)In “Chronicle of a Summer,” the filmmakers are on-camera presences. At the start, Rouch asks whether it is possible to record as natural a conversation as they might get without a camera present. In an early section of the film, Marceline, who assists the filmmakers in addition to serving as one of their subjects, approaches Parisians and asks about their lives, opening with the simple query, “Are you happy?” (Gordon Quinn, a founder of the Chicago documentary production company Kartemquin Films, would recycle this line of questioning in his 1968 film directed with Gerald Temaner, “Inquiring Nuns.”)Eventually, “Chronicle of a Summer” settles on a group of major characters, who are shown interacting with one another. The movie also periodically diverges from its interrogative mode to follow their lives. After Angelo, who works in a Renault factory, describes the monotony of his routine (when not working, he says, “The rest of the time, you spend sleeping, and you sleep so that you can work”), “Chronicle of a Summer” shows an alarm clock ringing and Angelo waking up and going to the factory. Onscreen, Morin himself introduces Angelo to Landry, a student from the Ivory Coast whose insights open a window on racism in France and colonial attitudes in Africa. Other figures we get to know include Mary Lou, who speaks openly of her apparent depression (for her, cinema-vérité becomes something akin to cinema-therapy), and Marceline, a Holocaust survivor who wrenchingly shares memories of her father.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Sooner or later, most men will experience a problem achieving or maintaining an erection. But today, there are more treatments than ever.Erectile dysfunction is more common than one might think. More than half of men over 40 will experience some kind of erectile problem, and the prevalence increases with age (though men in their 20s and 30s can be affected, too).The experience can have a devastating effect on a man’s well-being. Yet a shocking number of men don’t seek help. One industry survey suggests that just 51 percent of men with erectile dysfunction had discussed the issue with their doctor, and even fewer had spoken to their own partners about it.There is “not a medical condition that I’m aware of that affects more men’s lives,” said Dr. Mohit Khera, a urologist and the president of the Sexual Medicine Society of North America.But there are effective treatments, he added, beyond well-known medications like Viagra. These can include vacuum pumps, injections, implants, lifestyle modifications, testosterone-replacement therapy and sex therapy. Some combination of these options, experts said, almost always improve erections, even in the most severe cases.However, before men go anywhere near a pill or pump (or the “natural” male supplements commonly sold at gas stations), they should get a health exam to understand the causes of the dysfunction, which might point to a more serious health issue.“The penis can be seen as a barometer for the whole health of the person,” said Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sex medicine specialist in Maryland.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The watercolor was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore. He was paid $650.The original cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” sold for $1.92 million at auction on Wednesday, becoming the most expensive item related to the series, decades after its illustrator was paid a commission of just $650.The watercolor painting, which depicts the young wizard Harry going to Hogwarts from Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station, was part of the private library of an American book collector and surgeon, Dr. Rodney P. Swantko, whose other rare items were auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York this week.The year before the novel came out in 1997, its publisher, Bloomsbury, hired a 23-year-old from England who had just graduated from art school to design the book jacket, the auction house said. The artist, Thomas Taylor, would go on to establish the world’s conception of Harry Potter, with his iconic round glasses and lightning bolt scar.“It’s kind of staggering, really,” he said about the sale of his painting in an interview on Thursday. “It’s exciting to see it fought over.”Mr. Taylor was working at a children’s bookstore when he submitted sample drawings of wizards and dragons for the publisher in London to review, he said in a 2022 podcast interview. When he was selected, he said, “I was over the moon.”The cover was Mr. Taylor’s first professional assignment. And, at the time, “J.K. Rowling was as unknown as I was,” he wrote in his blog, referring to the novel’s British author.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

A majority of the justices dismissed the case, reinstating a lower-court ruling that paused the state’s near-total abortion ban.The Supreme Court said on Thursday that it would dismiss a case about emergency abortions in Idaho, temporarily clearing the way for women in the state to receive an abortion when their health is at risk.The brief, unsigned opinion declared that the case had been “improvidently granted.” The decision reinstates a lower-court ruling that had halted Idaho’s near-total ban on abortion and permitted emergency abortions at hospitals if needed to protect the health of the mother while the case makes its way through the courts.The decision, which did not rule on the substance of the case, appeared to closely mirror a version that appeared briefly on the court’s website a day earlier and was reported by Bloomberg. A court spokeswoman acknowledged on Wednesday that the publications unit had “inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document” and said a ruling in the case would appear in due time.The joined cases, Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States, focus on whether a federal law aimed at ensuring emergency care for any patient supersedes Idaho’s abortion ban, one of the nation’s strictest. The state outlaws the procedure, with few exceptions unless a woman’s life is in danger.The decision was essentially 6 to 3, with three conservative justices siding with the liberal wing in saying they would drop the case.It was the first time that the court was confronted with the question of statewide restrictions on abortion, many of which swiftly took effect after the court eliminated a constitutional right to the procedure two years ago.Tracking Abortion Bans Across the CountryThe New York Times is tracking the status of abortion laws in each state following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

More than 1,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine were killed or wounded on average each day in May, according to NATO and Western military officials.May was a particularly deadly month for the Russian army in Ukraine, with an average of more than 1,000 of its soldiers injured or killed each day, according to U.S., British and other Western intelligence agencies.But despite its losses, Russia is recruiting 25,000 to 30,000 new soldiers a month — roughly as many as are exiting the battlefield, U.S. officials said. That has allowed its army to keep sending wave after wave of troops at Ukrainian defenses, hoping to overwhelm them and break through the trench lines.It is a style of warfare that Russian soldiers have likened to being put into a meat grinder, with commanding officers seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are sending infantry soldiers to die.At times, this approach has proved effective, bringing the Russian army victories in Avdiivka and Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. But Ukrainian and Western officials say the tactics were less successful this spring, as Russia tried to take land near the city of Kharkiv.American officials said that Russia achieved a critical objective of President Vladimir V. Putin, creating a buffer zone along the border to make it more difficult for the Ukrainians to strike into the country.But the drive did not threaten Kharkiv and was ultimately stopped by Ukrainian defenses, according to Western officials.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Such tribunals, common in executive agencies, hear enforcement actions without juries, a practice that challengers said violated the Constitution.The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected one of the primary ways the Securities and Exchange Commission enforces laws against securities fraud.The agency, like other regulators, brings some enforcement actions in internal tribunals rather than in federal courts. The S.E.C.’s practice, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a six-justice majority in a decision divided along ideological lines, violated the right to a jury trial.“A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator,” the chief justice wrote.The case is one of several challenges this term to the power of administrative agencies, long a target of the conservative legal movement. The court last month rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of the way the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded. In January, it heard arguments in a pair of challenges to the Chevron doctrine, a foundational principle of administrative law that requires judicial deference to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. (That case has not been decided.)A central question in the new case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, No. 22-859, was whether the administrative tribunals violate the right to a jury trial guaranteed by the Seventh Amendment in “suits at common law.”Lawyers for the agency said juries were not required in administrative proceedings because they were not private lawsuits but part of an effort to protect the rights of the public generally. They added that agency adjudications without juries are commonplace, with two dozen agencies having the authority to impose penalties in administrative proceedings.The case concerned George Jarkesy, a hedge fund manager accused of misleading investors. The S.E.C. brought a civil enforcement proceeding against him before an administrative law judge employed by the agency, who ruled against Mr. Jarkesy. After an internal appeal, the agency eventually ordered him and his company to pay a civil penalty of $300,000 and to disgorge $685,000 in what it said were illicit gains.Mr. Jarkesy appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans. A divided three-judge panel of that court ruled against the agency on three different grounds, all with the potential to disrupt enforcement of not only the securities laws but also many other kinds of regulations.In addition to saying that the tribunals ran afoul of the right to a jury trial, the appeals court ruled that the agency’s judges were excessively insulated from presidential oversight and that Congress could not allow the agency itself to decide where suits should be filed. More

The well-connected attorney, who founded a powerhouse firm at the dawn of the #MeToo era, has faced complaints that she mistreated and insulted other lawyers.Roberta A. Kaplan, the celebrated lawyer who took on former President Donald J. Trump, and helped win marriage equality for gay Americans, is stepping down from the law firm she founded after clashing with her partners over her treatment of colleagues.Ms. Kaplan, a hard-charging civil rights lawyer, announced that she was leaving the firm, Kaplan Hecker & Fink, which she formed in 2017, to start a new one.Her departure followed months of internal frustration over Ms. Kaplan’s conduct toward other lawyers, according to people familiar with the matter. Those concerns led her colleagues to remove her from the firm’s management committee and precipitated her departure.Ms. Kaplan’s former firm will be renamed Hecker Fink effective Monday. “Robbie brought us together and for that we owe her a debt of gratitude,” the firm’s remaining partners said in an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times.“It was Robbie’s decision to leave the firm,” the firm’s two named partners, Julie Fink and Sean Hecker, said in a statement. “We wish her the very best and look forward to working with her and her new firm in the future.”Ms. Kaplan said in an interview with Bloomberg that she was leaving with a colleague because Kaplan Hecker & Fink had grown “in size and complexity beyond what I had in mind and I wanted to get back to something nimbler.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More